Hybrid Media

C&C • Creativity and Cognition (2026)

Case by Case

Generative AI as a Tool for Documentation and Speculation Across Material Practices

Description

Process documentation plays a central role in HCI and maker culture, where prototypes circulate through images, renders, and reproducible files that render making legible and transferable. Yet not all material practices lend themselves to clean, sequential representation. Processes that are time intensive, internally transformative, or physically immersive often produce incomplete records, shaping what can be analyzed and legitimized within research cultures oriented toward visibility and rapid iteration.

This paper introduces a hybrid documentation workflow that integrates AI-generated imagery with partial photographs, field notes, and first hand narrative accounts. Through a study of slip-casting ceramic enclosures for micro-controllers, we use generative reconstruction to recover missed moments, visualize transitional states, and speculate on possible forms. Generated images are treated as provisional visual hypotheses and examined against material evidence. We argue that AI-assisted reconstruction can extend the communicability of materially intensive practices while preserving their situated complexity, supporting the circulation of slower, less visually legible fabrication methods within HCI discourse.